Fear or Faith
I know many of you were convinced that last night about 6:00 local time, the world was going to come to an end. Just because it hasn't doesn't mean that it's not nearby. Because my appearing today at Yale University is surely one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse.
But listen, today is your day. Please do not turn off your electronic devices. Leave your iPhones, your iPads, your Sidekicks, your Droids, your BlackBerrys- Whoo.
Powered up, recording, photographing, texting out all that emerges from this stage over the next few minutes. Whoo. Whoo. By the way, I'm sporting the hat. It ain't coming off.
Whoo. You know, later on today, you can compare your tweets and your Facebook comments with those of others to figure out if anything memorable went down. Hey, you know what? Tweet that last sentence I just said.
It'll give you something to do. Give you something to do and let your friends know where you are today. Okay, then, okay, take this speech and set it to music, and maybe insert some crazy, kooky graphics.
Star in that video yourself. Post it on the web. And if it becomes a viral sensation, you'll be equal to any cat playing with a paper bag.
Any set of twin toddlers talking gibberish to each other. As popular as that cute girl that sings about Fridays. Hey you could be the next Sam Tsui.
Yeah. Whoo. Such are just one of the possibilities in our brave new world, the world you now inherit whether you like it or not. The jig is up. The clock has run out, and the future with a capital F now rests with all of you in your goofy hats.
And all because you went to Yale. Whoo. You are now the anointed, the charge holders, the best and the brightest. Each of you a shining hope for our nation and the world.
You are the new wizards who can finally make sense of all the delta vectors and square roots and divided bys and the theorem that we call the human race. Whoo. The generations before you came of age, took on the job. Now it's your turn.
Welcome. Whoo. You know, I once had a friend who had a rich uncle who promised to pay for his college as long as my friend wished to stay in school. "You should stay in school as long as you can," the rich uncle said, "because when you get out of college, you gotta work every day for the rest of your life."
And you all will come to understand what that rich uncle meant, just as surely as you will someday wonder where the hell you put your reading glasses and yell at your own kids to turn the damn music down.
On spring days like today, it's traditional for us to ponder the state of the world and implore you all to help make it a better place, which implies that things are somehow worse today than when we up here were where you are sitting right now. I'm not so sure the planet Earth is in worse shape than it was 30, no 18, no four years ago. But that's not to say it's in better shape either.
Refraining from waxing nostalgic and comparing our then to your now, and avoiding the, any talk of you kids these days with your rap and your hip-hop and your Snoopy Dog Daddies with the Diddy Pops. With your 50 Cents and your quarter cents. A sober look shows that just as the world has gotten to be a better place after all, it has also grown a bit worse at the exact same rate.
A one step up, one step back sort of cosmic balance between forward progress and cultural retreat that puts mankind on a bell curve of existence.
That shows a small segment enjoy ease and comfort, while an equal proportion struggle on with little hope, and the fortunes of the remainder either on the rise or on the wane in this confounding tide of so many damn things that we grow oblivious to the shifts in the quality of our lives.
Graduation day is a proper occasion to put a toe in the global waters, and I think the mercury shows that things are much as they always have been. 10 years ago, we busied ourself with trivial stuff imbued with importance, and then came 9/11. In 1991, riches were created and new businesses that had never existed, then that economic balloon burst.
In '81, I had a great job on TV. And in '82, Bosom Buddies was canceled. In '71, color TV in more living rooms than ever showed young Americans still fighting in combat in Vietnam.
And in '61, satellites beamed live images around the world for the very first time, but those images were of the building of the Berlin Wall. Now, this 10-year grid shows the same yin-yang thing, and I'm trying to copyright that. Yin-yang thang. Copyright Tom Hanks.
It shows the same yin-yang thang, thank you on graduation day 2011. You know, we all have these devices that can make a permanent record of revolutionary change on the other side of the globe, as well as hate-filled diatribes from across town. Fewer and fewer in our country go to bed hungry, but did you see how obesity now affects about half our population?
No matter how many bargains we find at the local U-Mart, many of us still struggle to pay the rent and the utilities. Our country is no longer at physical or even ideological war with our enemies for most of the last century, but in the 11 and a half years of the third millennium, our armed forces have been fighting in the field for nine of them.
Purchasing intellectual property and the work of artists we admire is as simple as clicking a mouse and paying less than a few bucks, which means you may find that there is no guarantee in making a living at your chosen discipline. Now, some advantages particular to this age are not to be denied. Boredom seems to have been vanquished.
There is always something to do. But hasn't this translated into a perpetual distraction in our lives? In the bathroom, at the dinner table, in the backseat, at a wedding, at a bris.
At a graduation day. There's always something to check, something to tweet, something to watch, something to download, something to play, something to share, something to buy, something on a voicemail, something to yank at our attention span, and it's all in the palm of our hand for a small monthly service fee. That same technology has allowed for a surplus of celebrities, and that is nothing to cheer about.
Anyone. Although, that's Sam Sueh. He rocks. Anyone can enjoy the perks of notoriety now, and the duration of fame has been lengthened from Andy Warhol's brief 15 minutes to a good 15 months if you're willing to do certain things on camera. Though Orwellian language is often the vocabulary of official newspeak, his boogeyman that was the all-seeing Big Brother has never emerged, unless you live in North Korea or run a red light in Beverly Hills.
Or shop online or have done something stupid in the wrong place at the wrong time in front of someone with a camera in their cellphone, and that is everybody. So pardon my junior college Latin, the vulgus populi has become the all-seeing state, and if you cross it, Google Search will forever display your screw-up. So actually, there is a Big Brother, but he's not a malevolent fiction.
He's actually all of us, and he lives in our search engines. So no matter how many times I do the calculations, I come up with a social draw. The positives balance the negatives.
The Xs equal the Ys. And our hopes weigh as much as our fears, but I hesitate on that last one because fear, good Lord, fear is a powerful physiological force in 2011. We here up in the stands and surrounding you graduating class look to you as we do every year, hoping you will now somehow through your labors free us from what we have come to fear, and we have come to fear many things.
Fear has become the commodity that sells as certainly as sex. Fear is cheap. Fear is easy. Fear gets attention. Fear is spread as fast as gossip and is just as glamorous, juicy, and profitable.
Fear twists facts into fictions that become indistinguishable from ignorance. Fear is a profit-churning go-to with a whole market being your whole family. You know, sitting in the house one day watching the game on TV not long ago, along came this promo for the local nightly news.
"Are our schools poisoning our children? That story and summer's hottest bikinis tonight at 11:00." In that I had school-age kids at the time, I feared that they were in fact being poisoned at school, and summer was still a few weeks away.
So I tuned in to get the scoop, and the actual news stories of that news broadcast was this: A certain supply of hamburger was found to have a bit too much of a particular bacteria in it, and for safety's sake, was being taken off the market. That same hamburger was slated for sale to an out-of-state school system for its cafeterias, but it was recalled in time. So answering that news program's own question then, no.
Our schools were not poisoning our children. But yes, that summer there would be some very hot bikinis at the beach. Now, the early American naval commander John Paul Jones said, "If fear is cultivated, it will become stronger.
If faith is cultivated, it will achieve mastery." And this is why I am a big fan of history, because observations of the American colonies over 200 years ago by a compatriot of Nathan Hale, who lived in that building right over Whoo. Translate word for word to the United States in 2011.
For I take that fear to be fear in the large scale, fear itself, intimidating and constant. And I take faith to be what we hold in ourselves, our American ideal of self-determination. Fear is whispered in our ears and shouted in our faces.
Faith must be fostered by the man or woman you see every day in the mirror. The former forever snaps at our heels and our synapses and delays our course. The latter can spur our boot heels to be wandering, stimulate our creativity, and drive us forward.
Fear or faith, which will be our master? Three men found that they could no longer sleep because of their deep-seated fears. This is a story I'm telling.
Their lives were in a state of stasis because of their constant worries, so they set out on a pilgrimage to find a wise man who lived high in the mountains, so high up above the tree line that no vegetation grew, no animals lived, not even insects could be found so high up in the mountains in that thin air.
And when they reached his cave, the first of the three said, "Help me, wise man, for my fear has crippled me." "What is your fear?" said, asked the wise man.
"I fear death," said the pilgrim. "I wonder when it is going to come for me." "Ah, death," said the wise man.
"Let me take away this fear, my friend. Death will not come to call until you are ready for its embrace. Know that, and your fear will go away."
Well, this calmed that pilgrim's mind, and he feared death no longer. The wise man turned to the second pilgrim and said, "What is it you fear, my friend?" "I fear my new neighbors," said the second pilgrim.
"They are strangers who observe holy days different than mine. They have way too many kids, and they play music that sounds like noise." "Ah, strangers," said the wise man.
"I will take away this fear, my friend. Return to your home and make a cake for your new neighbors. Bring toys to their children.
Join them in their songs and learn their ways, and you will become familiar with these neighbors, and your fear will go away." Well, the second man saw the wisdom in these simple instructions and knew he would no longer fear the family who were his neighbors. There in the cave, so high in the mountains that nothing could live, the wise man turned to the last pilgrim and asked of his fear.
"Oh, wise man, I fear spiders." "When I try to sleep at night, I imagine spiders dropping from the ceiling and crawling upon my flesh, and I cannot rest." "Ah, spiders," said the wise man.
"No shit. Why do you think I live way up here?" It's how it works. Fear will get the worst of the best of us, and peddlers of influence count on that.
Throughout our nation's constant struggle to create a more perfect union, establish justice, and ensure our domestic tranquility, we battle fear from outside our borders, from within our own hearts every day of our history. Our nation came to be despite fear of retribution for treason from a kingdom across the sea.
America was made strong and diverse because here people could live free from the fears that made up their daily lives in whatever land they called the old country. Our history books tell of conflicts taken up to free people from fear, those kept in slavery in our own states, and to liberate whole nations under the rule of tyrants and theologies rooted in fear.
The American cause at its best has been the cultivation of a faith that declares we will all live in peace when we are all free to worship as we choose, when we are free to express our hearts, and when we all seek a place free from fear. But we live in a world where too many of us are too ready to believe in things that do not exist.
Conspiracies abound. Divisions are constructed, and the differences between us are not celebrated for making us stronger, but are calculated and programmed to set us against each other. Our faith is tested by unpredictable providence and threatened when common sense is corrupted by specific interests. Speaking from 54 years of experience, the work towards a more perfect union is a never-ending concern that involves each and every one of us.
Evidence that our nation is becoming a better place is everywhere, but each new day fear is, as the Jersey poet said, lurking in the darkness on the edge of town. Your rising from bed every morning will give fear its chance to grow stronger just as it will afford faith its chance To blossom. You will make the choice to react to one or create the other.
And because you are smart enough to earn your place on this college day at Yale University, you will sense the moment and you will know what to do. In the meantime, ponder this front in the struggle against ceaseless fear and its ceaseless flow. In the coming months and years, veterans of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will finally come home for good after so many tours.
And we know this, and we know this. Some after many tours at war on the body, aid to the soul, and spilled a great portion of their lives. For all of them, after a long time spent far away in the harsh realm of war, and they return different from what they were when they left.
Surely, their faith in themselves is shadowed by a fear of not knowing what is expected of them next. Now, no matter what your view of those wars over there, you can affect the future of our nation right here by taking their fears head-on.
You can imprint the very next pages of the history of our troubled world by reinforcing the faith of those returning veterans, allowing them to rest, aiding in their recovery, if possible, their complete recovery. So let those of us who watched and debated their long deployments serve them now as they served when they were asked and as they were ordered.
Let's provide for them their place free from fear by educating them if they can learn, by employing them as they transition from soldier back to citizen, and by empathizing with the new journey they are starting even though we will never fully understand the journey they just completed.
We all will define the true nature of our American identity, not by the parades and the welcome home parties, but how we match their time in the service with service of our own.
Give it four years, as many years as you spent here at Yale, in acts both proactive and spontaneous, and do the things you can to free veterans from the new uncertainty that awaits them, from the mysterious fears they will face the day after they come home. Cultivate in them the faith to carry on and they will do the rest. So Commencements Day arrives.
Your work begins. Work that will not be always joyful to you labor that may not always fulfill you and days that will seem like one damn thing after the other. It's true, you will now work every day for the rest of your lives. That full-time job, your career as human beings and as Americans and as graduates of Yale, is to stand on the fulcrum between fear and faith.
Fear at your back, faith in front of you. Which way will you lean? Which way will you move?
Move forward. Move ever forward. And tweet out a picture of the results. It may make you as famous as Sam Suey.
Thank you and congratulations.
